"You are bad at using Provoke"

[Fyce]

So I guess the best way to explain provoke is 'For use in case you need immediate aggro and only if you intend on following up with another high enmity attack. Otherwise useless skill.'

This is a good answer, I quite like it. My thanks.
It's a clear explanation and leave the tank the option of asking "Why it is useless otherwise?" and that's nice.


As for some others said, yes, it does have a longer range... but I really don't think this little advantage is worth using a skill with such cooldown, especially at the start of a fight, which is a critical point in the "build enmity" phase. If, for some reason, the healer used a big heal or a DPS did a big critical on that enemy, the tank will instantly lose the aggro, which defeat the point of starting the encounter with Provoke since any healer or ranged DPS could have done exactly that with a weak skill.

I just think that the cases where the range of Provoke is enough to justify using it to engage a fight are very rare.
Anyway, what I'm more concerned about tanks using it everytime wrongly, not knowing what it exactly does, which may lead to some problems later. This is why I want to find a good way to explain it to them.

All Provoke does is matches your enmity with the person at the top of the list (even yourself), then adds 1 to that total. So if you use it right at the start of a fight, you generate a whole 1 enmity.

If you use it mid fight when you already have established your enmity, it just adds an extra 1 to your enmity, which will be meaningless.

If you are at 0 enmity with an enemy and a healer/dps/tank has 1000 enmity, when you use provoke you match the highest enmity, then add 1, so you would gain 1001 enmity. This is why it's important to follow it up with a shield lob or a comboed savage blade/rage of halone when possible.

This is what I used to say to explain it. But ingame, enmity is not represented by a number. At best it's a bar, at worse it's just a colored symbol near the name of the monster (green circle, yellow triangle, orange inverted triangle and red square).
I found that some new players had trouble understanding enmity as a number, and you won't take 10 minutes explaining to them why that is.
Reason why I like Warrlordd's answer better.